Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (50 page)

After all the pomp and circumstance, not to mention the gongs, girls, and parrot feathers surrounding the fleet’s departure, the situation was humbling, indeed. And it was just the sort of mishap that Magellan would likely have prevented, because he had always been meticulous about the condition of his ships and saw to it that they were seaworthy at all times.
Trinidad
had fallen into disrepair from sheer neglect, and with that ship disabled, the officers’ hasty decision to burn
Concepción
returned to haunt them. Not even Magellan would risk taking one, and only one, ship all the way from the Spice Islands back to Spain.

A
s soon as Almanzor—“our king”—heard about the plight of
Trinidad,
he sprang into action, boarding the afflicted ship and prowling below deck, trying to locate the source of the damnable leak, but without success. Then, “He sent five men into the water to see whether they could discover the hole. They remained more than one half hour under water, but were quite unable to find the leak.” The ship was listing badly, and desperate measures were required. “Seeing that he could not help us and the water was increasing hourly, [he] said almost in tears that he would send to the head of the island for three men, who could remain under water a long time.” Almanzor went in search of them, as the ship slowly but unmistakably settled into the water.

After an anxious night, Almanzor reappeared with the men by the first light of dawn. “He immediately sent them into the water with their hair hanging loose so that they could locate the leak by that means.” Water entering into ship would draw strands of their hair into its current. But even these men failed to locate the leak, and when they emerged, grim-faced, from the water, the king finally broke down in tears. Who among them, he pleaded, would be able to return to Spain now and tell King Charles about the loyalty of the king of Tidore?

Pigafetta and the others tried to calm the distraught ruler by describing their new plan for returning to Spain. “We replied to him that
Victoria
would go there in order not to lose east winds that were beginning to blow, while the other ship, until being refitted, would await the west winds and go then to Darién, which is located in another part of the sea in the country of Yucatán.” In other words, Elcano would take
Victoria
on a westerly course, which was the most direct route back to Spain. But it brought special dangers because it cut a swath through the Portuguese hemisphere, as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. If Portuguese navigators captured a Spanish ship loaded with spices in their waters, they would be merciless.
Trinidad’s
course home promised even greater risks. Once she was repaired, she would try to catch favorable winds carrying her along an easterly course to the American continent. Her cargo of spices would then be transferred to mules, and the beasts would carry the spices to another Spanish fleet heading for Seville.

As devoted and helpful as ever, Almanzor pledged no fewer than 250 carpenters to perform “all the work” required to return
Trinidad
to seaworthiness, and he promised to treat all the sailors who remained behind as if they were his own sons, vowing that “they would not suffer any fatigue beyond two of them to boss the carpenters in their work.” The king’s sincerity and generosity finally wore away the officers’ skepticism: “He spoke these words so earnestly that he made us all weep.”

T
he unsuccessful efforts to repair
Trinidad’s
mysterious leak and the deliberations leading to the decision that
Victoria
would return alone consumed five days. Just before
Victoria
left Tidore, the crew members loaded her with as many cloves as they could salvage from
Trinidad,
but once they saw
Victoria
riding low in the water, “mistrusting that the ship might open,” they lightened her by removing sixty quintals of cloves and storing the spices in the trading house.

Victoria
was so dilapidated that many crew members refused to board her. They preferred to remain with
Trinidad
in Tidore until she was repaired. Still others stayed behind because they feared that those aboard
Victoria
would “perish of hunger” long before they reached Spain. So the crew divided itself between the two ships, each man seeking the lesser of two evils:
Victoria,
the flimsy vessel that would depart for Spain immediately, or the much larger
Trinidad,
which needed weeks if not months of repairs before she could begin her journey home. Dangers abounded both on land and at sea; starvation and shipwreck imperiled those who sailed, while headless marauders or poison might fell those who remained behind.

In the end, Carvalho was designated captain of
Trinidad,
and Elcano took over the command of
Victoria.
Among the fifty-three men who cast their lot with
Trinidad
were Ginés de Mafra, the pilot; Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms (and second in command to Carvalho); and Hans Vargue, a German gunner. Pigafetta faced the most critical decision of the entire journey: Which ship would he join? His instinct for survival had stood many tests, and he elected to go along with Elcano aboard
Victoria;
that ship would carry him among her crew of about sixty men, including sixteen Indians. Although he detested the Basque mariner, he clearly had more confidence in Elcano’s seamanship than in Carvalho’s. Each ship in the divided fleet contained a memoirist, Pigafetta aboard
Victoria
and de Mafra aboard
Trinidad.
The Venetian resumed his passionate, eloquent descriptions of the Indies, while de Mafra—“a man of few but true words,” by his own account—stuck to a more practical report of what he perceived as bad judgment and missed opportunities.

E
arly on the morning of December 21, Almanzor, ever helpful, came aboard
Victoria
for the last time, delivering two pilots, paid for by the crew, to guide the ship safely through the maze of islands and shoals. The king then took his leave. Familiar with the tides, the pilots insisted that early morning was the most advantageous time to depart, but the men who remained behind persuaded
Victoria
to delay a few hours while they wrote long letters for her to carry home to Spain. Finally, at noon, it was time to leave the Spice Islands. “When that hour came,” Pigafetta recalled, “the ships bid one another farewell amid the discharge of the cannon, and it seemed as though they were bewailing their last departure. Our men [remaining behind] accompanied us in their boats a short distance, and then with many tears and embraces we departed.”

This should have been a festive occasion, the ships bulging with spices, heading for home port and the prospect of a grand reception from King Charles, but the damage to
Trinidad
dramatically altered the final leg of this voyage around the world and mocked the proud legend painted on her sails. The crew faced more than the ordinary pangs of leaving port for another long journey at sea, although those pangs—the monotony of life at sea, the nights interrupted by watches, the gradual diminution of their fresh food to a diet of salted dried meat, salted biscuit, and salted dried fish—were hard enough to bear, but now, in addition to all that, they knew their lives would be at risk the moment they were out of sight of the Spice Islands.

Despite the obstacles they had faced, the men of the armada had always taken comfort in the knowledge that they had extra ships at their disposal. Even two ships had a reasonable chance of making it back to Seville, but one ship was hardly equal to the task, no matter how skillful the crew’s seamanship, or how favorable the winds. One ship, alone on the high seas, was always at the mercy of storms, shoals, pirates, termites, or faulty navigation. On the high seas, no king could protect them, and at least one sovereign, the king of Portugal, wanted them dead. (Of all the captains in the armada, only Magellan had fully appreciated the full extent of Portuguese malice toward him.) Yet they had no choice but to face the tests presented by the ten-thousand-mile-long route home.

C H A P T E R   X I V
Ghost Ship

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.

L
aden with cloves and about sixty survivors,
Victoria
left the island of Tidore on December 21, 1521. Heading southwest, she called at a small island nearby to load firewood, and resumed her southerly course toward one of the most dangerous stretches of ocean in the world: the Cape of Good Hope.

Embarking on the final leg of the unprecedented journey around the world should have been an occasion for relief among the homeward-bound crew members, but it was not. The character of the expedition had changed completely; the Armada de Molucca finally had its spices, but it had lost its soul. The absence of Magellan’s guiding hand, his fierce discipline, even his quixotic delusions of grandeur, left the two remaining ships and their crew members without a sense of overriding purpose. Only survival mattered now. Even if the crew survived the voyage home, they were anxious about the reception they would receive in Spain. Although they had no knowledge of
San Antonio’s
arrival in Seville seven months earlier, they suspected that the mutineers aboard that ship might have made it back and succeeded in discrediting Magellan. Elcano and
Victoria’s
crew feared they would be arrested and jailed for treason

the moment they tied up at the dock. Desertion might have been an appealing option among the grim choices facing the sailors, except for their fear of cannibals inhabiting the islands surrounding them. In the end, staying aboard ship served as the best strategy to forestall disaster. They found themselves prisoners of peculiar circumstances, hostages to a situation created largely by those who had predeceased them.

Even Antonio Pigafetta, so determined to bring the news of Magellan’s accomplishments back to Europe, was at a loss for words, content simply to note the islands
Victoria
passed: Caion, Laigoma, Sico, Giogi, and Caphi, all part of the Moluccas. On the advice of local pilots, he recorded, “We turned toward the southeast, and encountered an island that lies in a latitude of two degrees toward the Antarctic Pole, and fifty-five leagues from Maluco. It is called Sulach [later called Xulla], and its inhabitants are heathens.” Here Pigafetta briefly resumed his amateur anthropology: “They have no king, and eat human flesh. They go naked, both men and women, only wearing a bit of bark two fingers wide before their privies.” Cannibals seemed to be everywhere; Pigafetta listed ten islands to be avoided at all costs.

Two days after Christmas, the ship found anchorage in Jakiol Bay, where the crew obtained fresh, and much needed, supplies, along with an Indonesian pilot who knew his way around these islands. Under his guidance, the crew sailed on as if in a trance, heading south, narrowly avoiding Moors and cannibals, coral reefs and hidden sandbars. Eventually,
Victoria
put the Indonesian islands astern, passing through the Alor Strait and eluding pirates. As a lone vessel laden with spices,
Victoria
was especially vulnerable to predators.

On January 8, 1522,
Victoria
entered the Banda Sea, extending west of the Moluccas, and the torpid weather suddenly changed. “We were struck by a fierce storm,” Pigafetta reported, “which caused us to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guidance. Running before the storm, we landed at a lofty island, but before reaching it we were greatly worn out by the violent gusts of wind that came from the mountains of that island, and the great currents of water.” The squall nearly shattered the ship, but Elcano avoided the rocks and reefs, and when the seas moderated,
Victoria
limped to an anchorage close to shore. The next day, divers inspecting the hull discovered extensive damage, and the men gingerly hauled the vessel onto a beach to commence repairs and caulking.

The inhabitants of this island, known as Malua, shocked even these hardened sailors. They were, said Pigafetta, “savage and bestial, and eat human flesh,” and their appearance combined the frightening and the outlandish. They went naked, or nearly so, “wearing only that bark as do the others, except when they go to fight, they wear certain pieces of buffalo hide behind, and at the sides, which are ornamented with small shells, boars’ tusks, and tails of goat skins fastened before and behind.” They lavished most of their attention on their hair, “done up high and held by bamboo pins which they pass from one side to the other.” Completing this curious picture, “They wear their beards wrapped in leaves and thrust into small bamboo tubes—a ridiculous sight.” All in all, Pigafetta judged them to be “the ugliest people in the Indies.”

Despite the inhabitants’ bizarre appearance, the sailors, by this time old hands in such transactions, bestowed trinkets on them, and both sides quickly made peace. As the sailors set to work repairing the ship, the aristocratic Pigafetta, spared the indignity of physical labor, roamed the island, studying its flora and fauna, noting an abundance of fowl and goats and coconuts and pepper: “The fields in those regions are full of this pepper, planted to resemble arbors.” He was speaking of black pepper, which had been introduced to the island some time before the Europeans’ arrival, and which the inhabitants carefully cultivated.

T
wo weeks later, with repairs to the hull completed, Elcano gave the order to resume their voyage home, and the crew set sail on Saturday, January 25.
Victoria,
having sailed five leagues or so, called at the island of Timor, towering nearly ten thousand feet above the shimmering surface of the Pacific. Everyone aboard her looked forward to a luxurious, satisfying time ashore, because food, spices, almonds, rice, bananas, ginger, and fragrant wood were all said to grow there in abundance.